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Introduction: The Ethical Turn in African Literature

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Ethics and Human Rights in Anglophone African Women’s Literature

Part of the book series: Comparative Feminist Studies ((CFS))

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Abstract

Eze offers a profound introduction to the recent emphasis on the ethical in African literary and cultural discourses. Contemporary African women writers are no longer interested in writing back to the Empire; they write back to their bodies. In narrating stories of women incapacitated by the ideologies of tradition and patriarchy, the writers demand that women be treated as ends, not as means to men’s ends. Eze proposes feminist empathy as a theoretical tool for understanding the writers’ works. Feminist empathy is the ability to feel oneself into the experience of a woman in unwarranted suffering, that is, suffering that resulted due to no fault of her own. Eze argues that these writings enact ways of being human; they script human rights.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Bill Ashcroft, Helen Tiffin, and Gareth Griffith, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures. London: Routledge, 1989 (Ashcroft et al. 1989). There are, of course, important exceptions to the write-back ideology exemplified by Things Fall Apart. These include writers such as Wole Soyinka, Yambo Ouologuem. See especially Chapter 8 of Kwame Anthony Appiah, In My Father’s House: Africa in the Philosophy of Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992 (Appiah 1992).

  2. 2.

    Evan Mwangi, Africa Writes Back to Self: Metafiction, Gender, Sexuality. New York: State University of New York Press, 2009 (Mwangi 2009).

  3. 3.

    Zoe Norridge, Perceiving Pain in African Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012 (Norridge 2012).

  4. 4.

    Brenda Cooper, A New Generation of African Writers: Migration, Material Culture & Language. Suffolk, UK: James Currey, 2008 (Cooper 2008).

  5. 5.

    Ranka Primorac, The Place of Tears: The Novel and Politics in Modern Zimbabwe. London: Taurus Academic Studies, 2006 (Primorac 2006).

  6. 6.

    Ken Harrow, Less than One and Double: A Feminist Reading of African Women’s Writing. Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 2002) (Harrow 2002). See also Marie Kruger, Women’s Literature in Kenya and Uganda: The Trouble with Modernity. New York: Palgrave, 2011 (Kruger 2011).

  7. 7.

    My book centers exclusively on Anglophone African writers. This is not a statement on Francophone African writing. South Africa presents unique challenges. For more on South African feminism see Pumla Dineo Gqola, Rape: A South African Nightmare. Johannesburg, SA: Jacana Media, 2015 (Dineo Gqola 2015). Missing in the list of works I have discussed here is Doreen Baingana’s book, Tropical Fish: Stories Out of Entebbe. Amherst: University of Massachusetts, 2003 (Baingana 2003). I have discussed it exhaustively in my other work. See Chielozona Eze, Postcolonial Imagination and Moral Representations in African Literature and Culture. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2011 (Eze 2011) See also Chielozona Eze, “Rethinking African Culture and Identity: The Afropolitan Model,” Journal of African Cultural Studies, 26.2 (2014): 234–247. (Eze 2014).

  8. 8.

    Norridge, Perceiving, 4. (Norridge 2012).

  9. 9.

    Ibid., 1–2. It is also true that the literary aestheticization of pain could lead to voyeuristic pleasure.

  10. 10.

    My uses of the word “pain” in this book refer specifically to those instances of privation, injustice, displeasure, or indeed, bodily trauma that are directly or indirectly occasioned by culture or tradition. Such instances of pain, of course, refer more to conditions rather than to a specific experience of ache or displeasure such as migraine, backache, et cetera.

  11. 11.

    Susan Moller Okin, Is Multiculturalism Bad for Women? New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1999, 10–23 (Moller Okin 1999).

  12. 12.

    As I hope to make clear in my discussions, contemporary African women writers, building upon the efforts of their predecessors, stress the need to go beyond the Africa/West dichotomy of the conventional discourse. When Lola Shoneyin, for instance, tells the stories of four women forced to share a common man, and later fleshes out the queer sexual orientation of one of them in a piece of drama, she follows the admirable footsteps of Ama Ata Aidoo in Changes, Buchi Emecheta in The Joys of Motherhood, and Flora Nwapa in Efuru and directly addresses her community in view of enhancing human flourishing there.

  13. 13.

    Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, We Should All Be Feminists, 2013 (Ngozi Adichie 2013). http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/We-should-all-be-feminists-Chim. This difference is not qualitative. Indeed, Emecheta’s The Joys of Motherhood is a profound feminist text that lends itself to the model of interpretation I suggest here. If Emecheta and the writers of her time were interpreted predominantly in the nationalist paradigm, it is because of the political mood of the period, which downplayed the needs of individuals for the benefit of the nation.

  14. 14.

    Susan Andrade, The Nation Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms, 1958–1988. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2011 (Andrade 2011).

  15. 15.

    A reviewer has pointed out that Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie could be said to be concerned with the (Biafran) nation in Half of a Yellow Sun. I am not sure that she laments the loss of Biafra as a nation as much as she highlights man’s inhumanity to man. It is conceivable that she uses the historical context of the Nigerian civil war to examine the human condition.

  16. 16.

    There has been an explosion of studies on the African woman’s body. These studies include the image of the body, the African woman’s body image, et cetera. See for instance, Pumla Dineo Gqola, “Editorial: Yindaba kaban’ u’ba ndilahl’ umlenze? Sexuality and Body Image,” Agenda: Empowering Women for Gender Equity 63, African Feminisms, 2.2: Sexuality and Body Image (2005): 3–9 (Dineo Gqola 2005).

  17. 17.

    For more on this definition see Robert Attfield and Susnne Gibson, “Ethics,” in A Dictionary of Cultural and Critical Theory, ed. Michael Payne. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishers, 1996 (Attfield and Gibson 1996).

  18. 18.

    Of course one can also have a relation to oneself, as Foucault implies in the care of the self. Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth: The Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. Paul Rabinow. New York: The New Press, 1997 (Foucault 1997).

  19. 19.

    See Jacques Rancière, “The Ethical Turn of Aesthetics and Politics,” Critical Horizons, 7.1 (2006): 1–20 (Rancière 2006).

  20. 20.

    Butler in interview, cited in Carolyn Culbertson, “The Ethics of Relationality: Judith Butler and Social Critique,” Continental Philosophy Review, 46 (2013): 449–463 (Culbertson 2013).

  21. 21.

    Judith Butler, “Giving an Account of Oneself,” Diacritics, 31.4 (2001): 25 (Butler 2001). See also Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself. New York: Fordham University Press, 2005. (Butler 2005).

  22. 22.

    Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues. Peru, Illinois: Open Court, 1999 (MacIntyre 1999).

  23. 23.

    Butler, “Giving an Account,” 28 (Butler 2005).

  24. 24.

    Ibid., 35.

  25. 25.

    Ibid., 36.

  26. 26.

    Lawrence Buell, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Ethics,” in The Turn To Ethics, ed. Marjorie Garber et al. New York: Routledge, 2000, 6 (Buell 2000).

  27. 27.

    Wolfgang Iser, The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980 (Iser 1978).

  28. 28.

    Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1969, 43 (Levinas 1969).

  29. 29.

    Levinas, Totality, 43. (Levinas 1969).

  30. 30.

    Emmanuel Levinas, Ethics and Infinity: Conversations with Phillip Nemo, trans. Richard Cohen. Pittsburgh, Duquesne University Press, 1985, 87–88 (Levinas 1985).

  31. 31.

    Levinas, Totality, 50 (Levinas 1969).

  32. 32.

    Cited in Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Integrating Disability, Transforming Feminist Theory,” NWSA Journal, 14.3 (2002): 1–32 (Thomson 2002).

  33. 33.

    Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, “Integrating,” 6. See also Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997 (Thomson 1997).

  34. 34.

    Iris Marion Young, “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality,” Human Studies 3.2 (1980): 152 (Young 1980). See also, Iris Marion Young, Throwing Like a Girl and Other Essays in Feminist Philosophy and Social Theory. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990 (Young 1990). Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie alludes to the fact that sexist and patriarchal societies disable women’s bodies in her talk, “We Should all be Feminists.” I will return to this idea in Chapter 2. See also Susan Archer Mann, Ashly Suzanne Patterson, eds, Reading Feminist Theory: From Modernity to Postmodernity. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015 (Archer Mann 2015).

  35. 35.

    Young, “Throwing Like a Girl,” 140 (Young 1990).

  36. 36.

    As I will make clear in my discussion of empathy, it is obvious that some readers resist identification.

  37. 37.

    Glo Chukukere, “An Appraisal of Feminism in the Socio-Political Development of Nigeria,” in Sisterhood, Feminism and Power: From Africa to the Diaspora, ed. Obioma Nnaemeka. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1998, 134 (Chukukere 1998).

  38. 38.

    Femi Ojo-Ade, “Female Writers, Male Critics,” African Literature Today, 13 (London: Heinemann, (1983): 158–179 (Ojo-Ade 1983).

  39. 39.

    See Chinweizu, Anatomy of Female Power: A Masculinist Dissection of Matriarchy. Lagos, Nigeria: Pero Press, 1990 (Chinweizu 1990).

  40. 40.

    It is not always unambiguous what a feminist interpretation would be. Furthermore, when positions and causes are claimed by academics who live and work in the Northern Hemisphere, or those who position themselves as defenders of Africa, these interpretations often become even more complexly contradictory.

  41. 41.

    I do not imply that there is a monolithic form of Western feminism. Nor can one make the same claim about African feminism, or African culture. I merely seek to capture the differences between the practices of feminism in the West and in Africa.

  42. 42.

    See Chandra Mohanty Talpade, Ann Russo, and Lourde Torres, eds, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991 (Mohanty Talpade et al. 1991).

  43. 43.

    As I pointed out above, African feminism has, of course, gone beyond the initial demands of third-wave feminism. There are now many works that increasingly concentrate on the African woman’s body image. Evan Mwangi’s Africa Writes Back to Self also deals with the attention to African women’s queer bodies as part of African self-reflexivity.

  44. 44.

    I present the works of these authors more as a literature review in order to establish the need for my theoretical intervention. My overall contention is that the theory most of them pursued was aimed at writing back to the colonial assault on Africa, not to critically explore Africa’s complex condition. In so doing the theorists failed to engage the ethical dimension of African writing.

  45. 45.

    I do not ignore important works that engage with feminism in the Francophone areas of Africa: example, works of writers such as Irène d’Almeida, Francophone African Women: Destroying the Emptiness of Silence. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1994 (Almeida 1994). Also of importance is Ayo A. Coly, The Pull of Postcolonial Nationhood: Gender and Migration in Francophone African Literatures. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010 (Coly 2010).

  46. 46.

    See Obioma Nnaemeka, ed., Sisterhood, Feminism and Power: From Africa to the Diaspora. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1998 (Nnaemeka 1998) and Tejumola Olaniyan and Ato Quayson, eds, African Literature: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2007 (Olaniyan and Quayson 2007). See also Susan Arndt, The Dynamics of African Feminism: Defining and Classifying African-Feminist Literatures. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2001 (Arndt 2001). Gloria Chukukere, Gender Voices and Choices: Redefining Women in Contemporary African Fiction. Enugu: Fourth Dimension, 1995 (Chukukere 1995). Stephanie Newell, ed., Writing African Women: Gender, Popular Culture and Literature in West Africa. London: Zed, 1997 (Newell 1997). See also Phanuel A. Egejuru and Ketu H. Katrak, eds, Nwanyibu: Womanbeing and African Literature. Trenton: Africa World, 1997 (Egejuru and Katrak 1997).

  47. 47.

    Carole Boyce Davies, “Introduction: Feminist Consciousness and African Literary Criticism,” in Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature, ed. Carole Boyce Davies and Anne Adams Graves. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1986, 8–12 (Davies 1986).

  48. 48.

    Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society. London: Zed Books Ltd, 1987, 4–6 (Amadiume 1987).

  49. 49.

    Ibid., 15.

  50. 50.

    Oyeronke Oyewumi, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses. University of Minnesota Press, 1997, xii (Oyewumi 1997). See also Nkiru Uwechia Nzegwu, Family Matters: Feminist Concepts in African Philosophy of Culture. New York: State University of New York, 2006 (Nzegwu 2006).

  51. 51.

    Oyeronke Oyewumi, ed., African Women and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, Inc., 2003), 1 (Oyewumi 2003a)

  52. 52.

    Ibid., 2.

  53. 53.

    Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi, “Womanism: The Dynamics of the Contemporary Black Female Novel in English,” in The Womanist Reader, ed. Layli Phillips. New York: Routledge, 2006, 28 (Ogunyemi 2006). Layli Phillips highlights the relationship between Walker and Okonjo-Ogunyemi by providing their original texts, and the contexts of their ideas.

  54. 54.

    Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi, Africa Wo/Man Palava: The Nigerian Novel by Women (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 114 (Ogunyemi 1996).

  55. 55.

    For a critical assessment of this position, see Chapter 5 of this book.

  56. 56.

    Mary E. Modupe Kolawole, Womanism and African Consciousness. Trenton, NJ; Asmara: Africa World Press, 1997, 27 (Kolawole 1997).

  57. 57.

    Catherine Obianuju Acholonu, Motherism: The Afrocentric Alternative. Owerri, Nigeria: Afa Publications, 2002, 110 (Acholonu 2002).

  58. 58.

    Morala Ogundipe-Leslie, Re-creating Ourselves: African Women and Critical Transformations. Trenton, NJ: African World Press, 1994, 207–238 (Ogundipe-Leslie 1994).

  59. 59.

    Obioma Nnaemeka, “Nego-Feminism: Theorizing, Practicing, and Pruning Africa’s Way,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 29.2 (2003): 369 (Nnaemeka 2003).

  60. 60.

    Ibid., 377–378.

  61. 61.

    Nzegwu, Family Matters, 2 (Nzegwu 2006).

  62. 62.

    One particular example in which Afrocentric abstraction replaced a Eurocentric model is in Okonjo Ogunyemi’s discussion of Mariama Bâ ’s novella about polygamy. I have discussed it in Chapter 5.

  63. 63.

    Elleke Boehmer, Gender and Narrative in Postcolonial Nation. Manchester University Press, 2005, 4–5 (Boehmer 2005).

  64. 64.

    Florence Stratton, Contemporary African Literature and the Politics of Gender. New York: Routledge, 1994 (Stratton 1994).

  65. 65.

    Meg Samuelson, Remembering the Nation Dismembering Women? Stories of the South African Transition. University of Kwazulu Natal Press, 2007, 7 (Samuelson 2007).

  66. 66.

    Pinkie Mekgwe, “Theorizing African Feminism(s): The ‘Colonial’ Question,” QUEST: An African Journal of Philosophy/Revue Africaine de Philosophie, XX (2008): 21–22 (Mekgwe 2008).

  67. 67.

    Ibid.

  68. 68.

    For more on the pitfalls of postcolonial thinking see Denis Ekpo, “Introduction: From Negritude to Post-Africanism,” Third Text, 24.2 (2010): 182. (Ekpo 2010).

  69. 69.

    Sarah Nuttal has critiqued postcolonial theory as ineffectual in explaining the complex nature of present-day reality. Postcolonialism has erred in its exaggeration of difference between the West and others. See Sarah Nuttall, Entanglement: Literary and Cultural Reflections on Post-apartheid. Johannesburg: Wits University Press, 2009, 31 (Nuttall 2009).

  70. 70.

    Buchi Emecheta exposes the poverty of this attitude towards women in The Joys of Motherhood. London: George Braziller Inc., 1980 (Emecheta 1980).

  71. 71.

    Sylvia Tamale, “African Feminism: How Should We Change?” Development: Supplement: Women’s Rights and Development; Association for Women’s, 49.1 (2006): 38–41. (Tamale 2006).

  72. 72.

    Ibid., 2.

  73. 73.

    Stratton, Contemporary African Literature, 22 (Stratton 1994).

  74. 74.

    Andrade, The Nation Writ Small, 30 (Andrade 2011).

  75. 75.

    Ibid., 34.

  76. 76.

    Buchi Emecheta, “Feminism with a Small ‘f’!,” in Criticism and Ideology. Second African Writers’ Conference, ed. Kirsten Holst Petersen. Uppsala: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1988, 173–185 (Emecheta 1988).

  77. 77.

    See for instance Chika Unigwe, In the Shadow of Ala. Igbo Women Writing as an Act of Righting. Thesis (Ph.D.) Leiden University, 2004 (Unigwe 2004).

  78. 78.

    Salome C. Nnoromele, “Representing the African Woman: Subjectivity and Self in The Joys of Motherhood,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 43.2. (2002) (Nnoromele 2002).

  79. 79.

    Carol Boyce Davies, “Introduction: Feminist Consciousness,” 8–12 (Davies 1986).

  80. 80.

    Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi, Gender in African Women’s Writing. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997, 5 (Nfah-Abbenyi 1997).

  81. 81.

    Ibid., 6.

  82. 82.

    Ibid., 14.

  83. 83.

    Nancy Topping Bazin, “Venturing into Feminist Consciousness: Two Protagonists from the Fiction of Buchi Emecheta and Bessie Head,” Sage II (Spring 1985), 32–36 (Bazin 1985).

  84. 84.

    Terry Eagleton, After Theory. New York: Basic Books, 2003, 2 (Eagleton 2003).

  85. 85.

    Mencius. Translated by D.C. Lau. London: Penguin Classics, 1970, 82 (Lau 1970).

  86. 86.

    Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Edited by Knud Haakonssen. Cambridge University Press, 2002, 11–12 (Smith 2002).

  87. 87.

    Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001, 327 (Nussbaum 2001a).

  88. 88.

    Frans De Waal, The Age of Empathy: Nature’s Lessons for a Kinder Society. New York: Harmony Books, 2009, 115 (De Waal 2009).

  89. 89.

    Theodor Lipps, Zur Einfühlung. Leipzig: Engleman, 1913 (Lipps 1913).

  90. 90.

    De Waal, The Age of Empathy, 65 (De Waal 2009).

  91. 91.

    Ibid., 65.

  92. 92.

    Simon Baron-Cohen, Zero Degrees of Empathy. London: Allen Lane, 2011, 10 (Baron-Cohen 2011).

  93. 93.

    Ibid., 12.

  94. 94.

    Suzanne Keen, “A Theory of Narrative Empathy,” Narrative, 14.3 (2006): 208 (Keen 2006).

  95. 95.

    Ibid., 209 (Original emphasis).

  96. 96.

    Suzanne Keen, Empathy and the Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007, 147–148 (Keen 2007).

  97. 97.

    Abdul R. JanMohamed, “The Economy of Manichean Allegory: The Function of Racial Difference in Colonialist Literature,” Critical Inquiry, “Race,” Writing, and Difference, 12.1 (1985): 59–87 (JanMohamed 1985).

  98. 98.

    Albert Memmi, The Colonizer, the Colonized. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1990 (Original, 1965) (Memmi 1990).

  99. 99.

    De Waal, The Age of Empathy, 214 (De Waal 2009).

  100. 100.

    James D. Johnson, Carolyn H. Simmons, Amanda Jordav, Leslie Maclean, Jeffrey Taddei, Duane Thomas, John F. Dovidio, and William Reed, “Rodney King and O.J. Revisited: The Impact of Race and Defendant Empathy Induction on Judicial Decisions,” Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 32.6 (2002): 1208–1223 (Johnson et al. 2002).

  101. 101.

    Sophie Trawalter, Kelly M. Hoffman, and Adam Waytz, “Racial Bias in Perceptions of Others’ Pain.” http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0048546 (Accessed March 24, 2014) (Trawalter et al. 2014).

  102. 102.

    When I identify the works of contemporary African women writers in terms of feminist empathy, I do not imply that the writers of previous generations were never similarly engaged. They were. However, given the time period in which they wrote, most scholars of their time were more interested in addressing what they perceived as the larger threat to Africa’s existence: Western imperialism. They therefore did not pay adequate attention to the pain that African socio-cultural institutions inflicted on women’s bodies. It is also not surprising that even in our time, scholars such as Susan Andrade insist that the feminist works of these earlier writers be read as attempts to frame the nation.

  103. 103.

    United Nations. “What Are Human Rights?” http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Pages/WhatareHumanRights.aspx (Accessed March 2, 2015). (United Nations 2015).

  104. 104.

    An-naim Abdullahi and Francis M. Deng, eds, Human Rights in Africa: Cross-Cultural Perspectives. Washington, DC: The Brookings Institute, 1990, 1 (Abdullahi and Deng 1990).

  105. 105.

    Ibid., 1–2

  106. 106.

    Marie-Bénédicte Dembour, “What Are Human Rights? Four Schools of Thought,” Human Rights Quarterly, 32.1 (2010): 2–4 (Dembour 2010).

  107. 107.

    For details on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, see. The United Nations, “The Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/ (Accessed March 2, 2015) (United Nations 2015).

  108. 108.

    Thomas Buergenthal, “International Human Rights in an Historical Perspective,” in Human Rights: Concept and Standards, ed. Janusz Symonides. Aldershot, UK: Dartmouth Publishing Company Ltd, 2000, 3 (Buergenthal 2000).

  109. 109.

    Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008 (Hunt 2008); Jack Donnelly, Universal Human Rights in Theory and Practice (2nd edition). Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003 (Donnelly 2003).

  110. 110.

    See also, Sangmin Bae, When the State No Longer Kills: International Human Rights Norms and Abolition of Capital Punishment. New York: State University of New York Press, 2007 (Bae 2007).

  111. 111.

    Donnelly, Universal Human Rights, 1 (Donnelly 2003).

  112. 112.

    See also Jerome J. Shestack, “The Philosophical Foundations of Human Rights,” in Human Rights: Concept and Standards, ed. Janusz Symonides. Aldershot, UK: Dartmouth Publishing Company Ltd, 2000, 54 (Shestack 2000).

  113. 113.

    Immanuel Kant, Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. Translated with an Introduction by Lewis White Beck. Upper Saddle River, NJ, 1997, 38 (Kant 1997).

  114. 114.

    Ibid., 46.

  115. 115.

    Elizabeth S. Anker, Fictions of Dignity: Embodying Human Rights in World Literature. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2012, 4 (Anker 2012).

  116. 116.

    African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, “African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights.” http://www.achpr.org/instruments/achpr/#a29 (Accessed May 20, 2015). (African Commission on Human and Peoples 2015).

  117. 117.

    Sylvia Tamale, “The Right to Culture and the Culture of Rights: A Critical Perspective on Women’s Sexual Rights in Africa,” Feminist Legal Studies, 16.1 (2008): 47–69, 50 (Tamale 2008).

  118. 118.

    African Commission on Human and People’s Rights, “African Charter” (African Commission on Human and People’s Rights 2015)

  119. 119.

    Tamale, “The Right to Culture,” 61. (Tamale 2008).

  120. 120.

    Sylvia Tamale, “Eroticism, Sensuality and ‘Women’s Secrets’ Among the Baganda: A Critical Analysis,” Feminist Africa Issue: Sexual Cultures, 5 (2005): 9 (Tamale 2005).

  121. 121.

    Micere Githae Mugo, African Orature and Human Rights in Gikuyu, Shona and Ndebele Zimani Cultures. Harare, Zimbabwe: Sapes Book, 2004, 7 (Githae Mugo 2004).

  122. 122.

    Ibid., 24.

  123. 123.

    Ibid., 24.

  124. 124.

    Ibid., 8.

  125. 125.

    Chielozona Eze, “Transcultural Affinity: Thoughts on the Emergent Cosmopolitan Imagination in South Africa,” Journal of African Cultural Studies, 17.2 (2015): 216–228 (Eze 2015).

  126. 126.

    Desmond Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness. New York: Image Doubleday, 1999, 31 (Tutu 1999).

  127. 127.

    Bernard Gert, “The Definition of Morality”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2012 edition), Edward N. Zalta, ed. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2012/entries/morality-definition/ (Accessed May 20, 2013). (Gert 2012).

  128. 128.

    Tutu, No Future Without Forgiveness, 31 (Tutu 1999).

  129. 129.

    Anker, Ibid., 2–3.

  130. 130.

    Joseph R. Slaughter, Human Rights, Inc: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International Law. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007, 3 (Slaughter 2007).

  131. 131.

    Ibid., 4.

  132. 132.

    Ibid., 252–253.

  133. 133.

    David Palumbo-Liu, The Deliverance of Others: Reading Literature in a Global Age. Durham: Duke University Press, 2012, 3–9 (Palumbo-Liu 2012).

  134. 134.

    Donnelly, Universal Human Rights, 11 (Donnelly 2003).

  135. 135.

    Though child marriage is defined as marriage before age 18, in most cases it is girls under the age of 15 who have been married away against their will. See http://www.unfpa.org/child-marriage See also, “Early Marriage in Nigeria,” http://nigeria.unfpa.org/nigeirachild.html.

  136. 136.

    Hillary Rodham Clinton, “Women’s Rights Are Human Rights.” http://gos.sbc.edu/c/clinton.html (Accessed May 15, 2013) (Clinton 2013). See also Hillary Clinton, Helping Women Isn’t Just a ‘Nice’ Thing to Do.” http://www.thedailybeast.com/witw/articles/2013/04/05/hillary-clinton-helping-women-isn-t-just-a-nice-thing-to-do.html (Accessed May 15, 2013) (Clinton 2013).

  137. 137.

    Joan Didion, We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live: Collected Nonfiction. New York: Alfred Knopf, 2006 (Didion 2006). See also Margaret Atwood, “Why We Tell Stories.” 2010. www.bigthink.com/ideas/24259 (Accessed June 3, 2012) (Atwood 2012).

  138. 138.

    James Dawes, “Human Rights in Literary Studies,” Human Rights Quarterly, 31.2 (2009): 395 (Dawes 2009). See also James Dawes, That the World May Know: Bearing Witness to Atrocity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007 (Dawes 2007).

  139. 139.

    I fully embrace the emotional impact that stories make on us even as I step back to critically interrogate those impacts. Jesus Christ is recognized not only as a religious figure, but also as an unquestionable moral leader. He fully utilized the power of narratives to impart moral values. For example, when he was asked a simple question of who one should consider one’s neighbor, he told the story of the Good Samaritan.

  140. 140.

    Arthur W. Frank, Letting Stories Breathe. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2010, 46 (Frank 2010).

  141. 141.

    Hunt, Inventing Human Rights, 82 (Hunt 2008). See especially Chapter 3 of the same book.

  142. 142.

    Shannon Sullivan, Revealing Whiteness: The Unconscious Habits of Racial Privilege. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006. (Sullivan 2006).

  143. 143.

    Sullivan, Cited in Samantha Vice, “How Do I Live in This Strange Place?” Journal of Social Philosophy, 42.3 (2010): 325 (Vice 2010).

  144. 144.

    Ibid., 331.

  145. 145.

    See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. Terence Irwin. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Co, 1999, 1–8 (Aristotle 1999). See especially Book 1 Chapter 5. §2. Aristotle underlines the importance of people pursuing happiness for its own sake. This has to be conducted in freedom. So it is imperative that people freely embrace virtue and responsibility in order to protect the lives of every individual in community. Freedom and responsibility are therefore necessary for human life to flourish. Alasdair MacIntyre is one of the most important contemporary philosophers to have fruitfully interpreted Aristotle’s idea of human flourishing. See especially Chapter 8 Alasdair MacIntyre, Dependent Rational Animals: Why Human Beings Need the Virtues. Peru, IL: Open Court, 1999 (MacIntyre 1999).

  146. 146.

    Adam Zachary Newton, Narrative Ethics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995, 12(Zachary Newton 1995).

  147. 147.

    Aristotle, Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. London: Penguin Books, 1996 (Aristotle 1996).

  148. 148.

    Ibid., 6.

  149. 149.

    Ibid., 10.

  150. 150.

    Stephen Halliwell, Aristotle’s Poetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998, 175–179 (Halliwell 1998).

  151. 151.

    Keen, Empathy and the Novel, 146 (Keen 2007).

  152. 152.

    Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, Trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1984 (Ricoeur 1984). I will return to this especially in Chapter 3, “Diary of Intense Pain: The Postcolonial Trap and Women’s Rights.”

  153. 153.

    Narratives do not prescribe a set of rules or norms. Indeed, as Tony E. Adams argues, a preformed set of principles runs the risk of doing violence to a story. Tony E. Adams, “A Review of Narrative Ethics.” Qualitative Inquiry, 14.2 (2008): 179 (Adams 2008).

  154. 154.

    Paul Ricoeur, “Life in Quest of Narrative,” in On Paul Ricoeur: Narrative and Interpretation, ed. David Wood. London: Routledge, 1991, 23 (Ricoeur 1991).

  155. 155.

    Hunt, Inventing Human Rights (Hunt 2008).

  156. 156.

    Feminism as ethics is different from feminist ethics. The latter seeks to “rethink traditional ethics to the extent it depreciates or devalues women’s moral experience.” See Rosemarie Tong and Nancy Williams, “Feminist Ethics”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2014) (Tong and Williams 2014). Edward N. Zalta, ed. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/feminism-ethics/.

  157. 157.

    Dawes, “Human Rights in Literary Studies” (Dawes 2009).

  158. 158.

    I will return to this issue in Chapter 8, in my discussion of the moral obligation of bearing witness to suffering.

  159. 159.

    Chantal Zabus, Between Rites and Rights: Excision in Women’s Experiential Texts and Human Contexts. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2007, 3 (Zabus 2007).

  160. 160.

    Anker, Fictions of Dignity, 8 (Anker 2012).

  161. 161.

    Zabus, Between Rites and Rights, 8–9 (Zabus 2007).

  162. 162.

    Françoise Lionnet makes the same argument about women’s self-representation. See Françoise Lionnet, Postcolonial Representations: Women, Literature, Identity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995 (Lionnet 1995).

  163. 163.

    Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Translated by Keith Cohen and Paula Cohen, Signs, 1.4 (1976): 875–893 (Cixous 1976).

  164. 164.

    Suzanne Keen, “Narrative Empathy,” in The Living Handbook of Narratology, ed. Peter Hühn et al. Hamburg: Hamburg University Press, 2014. hup.sub.uni-hamburg.de/lhn/index.php?title=NarrativeEmpathy&oldid=2044 (Accessed April 20, 2014) (Keen 2014).

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Eze, C. (2016). Introduction: The Ethical Turn in African Literature. In: Ethics and Human Rights in Anglophone African Women’s Literature. Comparative Feminist Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40922-1_1

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